When you buy a brand new car, you have to rev that engine up to the max just to see how fast the car can go even though nobody really drives their cars that fast. But it sort of gives an assurance that you are using a really powerful machine. The same is true for computers – when you get a brand new computer you should stress it out using one of the benchmark tools to see its CPU or GPU power. Even when you buy a hard drive, you can put it through a number of benchmark tests to see how fast it can read and write data.
ATTO Disk Benchmark is one of such tools that can stress your storage devices to find out the maximum data read and write rates under a number of different conditions. You can basically use it for all types of storage devices, but you should avoid testing your solid state storage devices such as SSDs because it will only reduce the lifespan of those devices. Hard disk drives (HDDs), on the other hand, are fair game.
Using it is very easy – all you have to do is select one of the hard drives (or any other type of storage device) from the drop-down listbox and click on the Start button. Among the options, you can change the I/O data size from 512 bytes to 64 megabytes and you can pick a file size from 64 kilobytes to 32 gigabytes. The data access options includes direct I/O, bypassing of write cache, and verification of written data.
For each of the I/O event the result is shown in the test results both in the text format and using the bar graph chart. There are tools in the menubar using which you can save the test results in BMK files and export the screenshot of the whole ATTO Disk Benchmark application as a JPEG image .
You can download ATTO Disk Benchmark from https://www.atto.com/disk-benchmark/.